Easter was there when I needed it most.
The year my daughter died, I celebrated Easter alone, isolated from friends and family and church. I celebrated alone in prison in a Muslim country.
I needed Easter that year.
I needed the dark despair of Good Friday and the silent hunger of Saturday; I needed the ridiculous anticipation of joy after death, the familial songs of Home, the outrageous hope of resurrection.
We teach our children to memorize their addresses and phone numbers. Why? So that if they ever got lost, they’d have a way to find home.
All my past Easters—they were rehearsals for this. I had a way Home.
***
As soon as the cleaners put away their mops and sapatas that morning, I slipped into the mutabikh to carry out my plan. I had thought about this for weeks and spent many hours sawing lilies out of white paper with a bladeless plastic childs’ scissor, wrapping the blooms in folded paper stems and curling each petal around a pencil.
Now, I worked quickly, going to each of the long aluminum tables to arrange paper vases on paper placements and inserting bouquets of lilies into each vase. I opened a precious bag of chocolate eggs and scattered them around the base of the vases.
Finished, I stepped back to look at my work.
Suddenly, it all seemed so silly, so pathetic—a bunch of paper that belonged in the trash. What did I think I was doing?
As the women trooped in for breakfast, I turned to sneak away, embarrassed, but couldn’t help hesitating just a bit to see their reactions. Most took no notice, squatted on the benches and snatched their share of pita bread. Others gathered up the chocolates. One stopped to ask me in English, “What this?”
“It’s Easter,” I shrugged sheepishly.
“What Easter?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
The women already whispered among themselves that I was the crazy Chinese who murdered her child and who called herself American. What’s one more thing?
Maybe they were right.
I was crazy to believe in life after the words, “she died.” I was crazy to believe in a Savior who didn’t save himself, in a Love that penetrates prison walls, in victory that looks more like loss.
I believed Easter.
They didn’t know that earlier that morning, I had awakened before dawn to show up for sunrise service. With my Bible and a Belvita biscuit tucked away for the occasion, I stepped into the darkness of the narrow prison courtyard enclosed by high walls. Tilting my head up, I peered into the rectangle of a still dark sky criss-crossed by wire netting. I watched as sunlight, a bright slice of mustard yellow, hit the top of one wall.
“The Son is risen,” I grinned to the empty sky.
The diagonal line delineating light from darkness continued to move slowly down the wall and eventually leaped onto the adjacent wall, extending the block of sunlight downwards towards where I waited in the shadows. I paced in a tight circle and sang all the Easter songs I could remember and many half-remembered ones too. I imagined the local fellowship meeting this morning singing the same songs. I imagined churches all across the time zone joining in. I imagined, for a sliver of a second, my daughter twirling in her butterfly dress.
Because if resurrection was possible, anything is possible.
What if all our Easters were practice for an Easter like this? Like forms in martial arts, we have rehearsed this Truth, training our muscles to memorize the shape of the resurrection for a day when we need it. The moment when we need it most is usually the moment when we’re least prepared. Have we absorbed so deeply the story of our hope that we respond instinctively?
We carry the songs of dawn into the dead of night.
This Easter, I’m not sure what I will do yet. I think I’ll inhale the wonder of wind and sky right outside my door. I’ll set the table with the beauty of pancakes. I’ll have the privilege of live-streaming a service and watching the chat box fill up with comments and greetings. I will sing the songs of Home and I will not be alone.
Maybe I’m crazy.
Or maybe Easter is crazy.
But it will be here, just when we need it most.